Hawkwind wrote:Skills are already really easy to twink up, why do you need more reasons to get them faster. Ideally, more incentives for roleplay is what is needed.

Twink is the keyword here, Hawkwind. There are many players that do not twink their skills and concentrate on roleplay. These players are hindered in their skill levels because they don't twink and it takes a long time to naturally raise a skill.

IF (and that's a big if) we investigate this further, we would make sure that easily-raised skills would not transfer into hard-to-raise skills and take into account several other factors as well, such as rpp, type of skills, etc...

Another option is to just bump the skill pool at chargen based solely on rpp.

Hawkwind wrote:Skills are already really easy to twink up, why do you need more reasons to get them faster. Ideally, more incentives for roleplay is what is needed.

Twink is the keyword here, Hawkwind. There are many players that do not twink their skills and concentrate on roleplay. These players are hindered in their skill levels because they don't twink and it takes a long time to naturally raise a skill.

IF (and that's a big if) we investigate this further, we would make sure that easily-raised skills would not transfer into hard-to-raise skills and take into account several other factors as well, such as rpp, type of skills, etc...

Another option is to just bump the skill pool at chargen based solely on rpp.

I'd personally like that a lot more. That really sounds like an easier way to automate role boosts.

WorkerDrone wrote:Rather than add in code that can be easily gamed by abusive players, maybe the amount of points players start with out of chargen should be looked at again?

+1 to this.

This. If I'd known how low the new character point-pool was when you start, I would have just picked eight skills. It wouldn't have made much more difference.

On Atonement, you could pick four skills and start with them in the familiar range, maybe even one or two at talented if you were lucky with your stat rolls.

Here, I rolled five skills, expecting it to be about the same and ended up with all novice and apparently very low amateur. At that point, it would have been far more beneficial to just take eight skills. Which is what I will be doing every time if this isn't changed. Even old SOI didn't have stat pools this low.

Edit: And just so this actually contains something on topic, I voted no. I am completely and utterly against carry-over of any sort from one character to another. Next people will be wanting to carry over their memories and their possessions. This is a slippery slope.

“If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.”

I find it quite interesting that many of you would like to bump up the skill pool on every character but are totally against the carryover idea, which would do exactly the same thing, but only for previous players.

The absolute easiest way to do this would be totally on rpp, rather than calculating how many skill points you had when you last died.

i.e. give an extra 25 pool points for every rpp you have, and you keep your rpp.

2. Keep the player population at various skill levels reasonable for the gameworld; avoid having all masters and no apprentices, etc.

3. Give new players things to strive toward, but don't make them feel like second-class citizens meanwhile. If someone's been serving diligently in the Guard for an IC year, he shouldn't be eclipsed by every other new character that rolls in.

4. Let experienced players play novice characters if it suits their concept.

Proposals:

1. Boost starting skill levels for everyone. Characters don't need to be experts out of the box, but they shouldn't start a level so low that hiring them is a net loss for a clan. If newbie crafters destroy more materials than not, if newbie healers hurt more people than they help, then players will feel obligated to grind; waiting for skills to improve through natural use will be burdensome and unpleasant.

2. Allow a percentage carry-over of skills from one character to another. Various pros and cons have been discussed already in this thread, but it seems worthwhile to note that if, say, 50% of my skill points carry over, then grinding is 150% as rewarding as it used to be -- which would seem to work against goal #1, above.

3. Automatically boost the starting skill pool on a per-RPP basis. This isn't a terrible idea. It conflicts with goal #4, but then, most players will take skill boosts if they're eligible for them. If we were to go this route, I think I'd rather see the points spent and then slowly but automatically regenerated over time, though -- I don't know that I want to see players able to roll a new boosted character every week. (And, as mentioned in goals #2 and 3, overpopulation of high-skill PCs may become an issue as average RPP levels rise.)

4. Associate skill boosts with chargen role picks, which can be opened either on the basis of our current RPP system or via a badge system (if we don't want someone who's never played a combat PC before rolling into a 'veteran soldier' role). We can also place age limits here -- if you want to pick a journeyman role, perhaps your character shouldn't be 18 years old. (And if age affects stats, there's the potential for some tradeoff in the decision.)

5. Give players things other than skill boosts on which to spend RPP, with the goal of discouraging the so-called 'cookie-cutter' syndrome (and, again, overpopulation of high-skill characters). An extra language. Extra starting coin. An underworld contact. A unique flavor item, an unusual backstory. Etc., etc.

Melkor wrote:It would be a bad thing for me to dredge up old things so I won't, I'll just tell you that when I come back, I'll come to kill you. And if that isn't enough, I'll come to kill your mother and if that isn't enough, I'll come back to kill you and your mother's children. When they grow to age, I'll kill them and their children and if they produce children, I'll kill them too and anything in between (AND I DO MEAN ANYTHING) will be mine to play with, and oh, I do have a mind to play with.

See where I'm going with this? I can do anything with that.

You seem to be assuming that the original proposal was going to allow anyone to carry over some or all of their skill points with this strange post, Melkor. The original proposal was meant to allow players with rpp to carry over SOME of their skill points. Players that would play in the manner you list above would not be able to carry over any points.

I think that there is another side of this that needs to be considered that hasn't been yet. I'll leave the discussion of the technical details of the proposal to those with better knowledge of them. However, I fear that this could raise the specter of favouritism, a ghost that I hope we can leave in it's moldering tomb.

If this is an option that is only given to RPP players, and it gets better with the more RPP you have I can easily see this becoming a rallying point for those who look for staff favouritism and want to denounce it. I believe that the staff, so far, are holding the correct course in trying to not allow favouritism to crop up, because it was extremely divisive and damaging in older iterations of SOI. Any policy like this should be considered in that light too, on whether the positives will outweigh damage to the OOC morale and community of the game.

I had originally voted no but changed to undecided after listening to the responses given by players.

I understand that Staff doesn't want folks to be overwhelmed by the loss of a long played character offering a faint glimmer i.e. Rollover minutes from the time investment they put in. Thats a kind gesture imo. Especially when no such thing had been offered before.

I would be wary of putting it behind an RPP barrier. Let everyone benefit from it to assure fairness. This would quell alot of complaints of RPP = Power.

I can see why some folks don't want any kind of carryover in their permadeath mud. I'm actually in that group personally but I questioned this when I stopped and thought about the 2RPP role I took. Wait, that was carryover, i'm being hypocritical if I think any sort of carryover is wrong.

Don't put it behind RPP. Make it an average from your overall and give the same % award to all players. This will create an huge push to not lose your character adding excitement! No more characters unafraid of death. More thought put into dangerous situations. And best of all its completely fair.

Just my thoughts.

Things that made me smile:

Icarus wrote:I'm going to kill the next character I see doing stuff like that. I'm not joking.

Justanothacivy wrote:Don't put it behind RPP. Make it an average from your overall and give the same % award to all players. This will create an huge push to not lose your character adding excitement! No more characters unafraid of death. More thought put into dangerous situations. And best of all its completely fair.

Just my thoughts.

On the other side of this coin, we get crafters (and some combat types too) that have long-lived characters with high skill levels. At this point we see a -lot- of players playing to survive because of the skills they have rather than play how they played starting off. It's a natural tendency to get more conservative as you rise in the ranks/skills.

For me, turnover is a good thing most times.

This thread is intended for players to offer their opinions and solutions that we've not considered here yet.

While I do agree with this to a degree, I think some people play defensively not only because of skill accumulation but because of the time spent building a character's personality and story ingame, and because they don't want to see the plots ongoing suddenly cut short, whereas at the beginning it's whatever and they're probably not as invested. If players are being extra careful about what they do later on, I can't see how that's a bad thing as it's a game we're playing and we're each taking fulfillment from it through different means. SOI appreciation comes in many flavors. Let the people who choose life choose life without stigma mang.

In my opinion, when one of my long-lived characters dies it's not the hours I spent grinding that I lament it's the sense of what could have been if their story continued. I've never much minded building up skills, it makes looking at the Adroit or Master on the list pretty satisfying, as opposed to knowing you started out 10-20 points away or whatever.

Honestly? I'm content with the current set up. We don't have a whole lot of craftsets that go beyond Familiar so starting at Novice/Amateur seems fine to me. It makes teaching ingame more important, and draws players together to learn things from professional characters.

Everything gets smaller now the further that I go
Towards the mouth and the reunion of the known and the unknown
Consider yourself lucky if you think of it as home
You can move mountains with your misery if you don't

Personally, attaching any coded ramifications that go beyond flavor to RPP seems like a bad idea, in my mind. You can drum up any number of justifications for why Player X should have 5 RPP and Player Y should only have 2 or perhaps 3, but Player X is the type of player who will typically either not spend or will regain all of their RPP in relatively short order. Player Y either does not have 5 RPP because they go beyond notice, or they are frequent RPP spenders.

When the only thing coming out of either players' respective situation is what race they're playing, rather than what skills, stats and equipment they start the game with, it's fairly impossible to cry foul on any of that, really. When the difference between 3 RPP and 5 RPP is stepping into the game with skills higher than Talented (which I don't think should happen at any point), then you start running into problems inherent within the system*.

Also, just to point out to Nimrod, as it's been stated earlier in reference to Atonement and its derivatives, the point selection that seemed most popular with people here who have experience with it anyway, meant that selecting four skills would usually result in PCs entering the game with their core set at familiar. The way RPP worked at the time, they could even get one, or maybe two at Talented out of chargen, and they couldn't really get any of them past Talented either.

I feel I should bold this part of the post, for awareness, but there's literally no reason at any point that a new character should enter a game with a skill higher than Talented. With the way roles work, and the behavior of players who happen to have their hands on RPP, they will frequently re-enter the game after retirement or death with the RPP to take a high-end role. I guess if you balanced the system by removing Role-boosts and made carry-over the coded boon of RPP characters, that could work, if it was hard capped to a degree.

*Such problems may not even be related to the RPP system or admins awarding RPP, but the behavior of each player.

I hope you die right now, will you drink my chemical?

Brian wrote:See, the thing that I admire about WorkerDrone is that he's an optimist!

No, do not like. I'd still be in favor of raising starting skill levels and slowing skill gains across the board, so that the focus shifts from immediately having to grind survival/crafting skills up to have a playable PC to simply roleplaying the skills you should feasibly already be competent at as an adult character. The upside is that this would benefit ALL players, not just veterans. Veterans have access to RPP, which is quite enough when you have skill-boosting roles for them.

Lowering the ability and necessity to grind skills, especially right off the bat, is nothing but a good thing for an RPI, IMO.

No, do not like. I'd still be in favor of raising starting skill levels and slowing skill gains across the board, so that the focus shifts from immediately having to grind survival/crafting skills up to have a playable PC to simply roleplaying the skills you should feasibly already be competent at as an adult character. The upside is that this would benefit ALL players, not just veterans. Veterans have access to RPP, which is quite enough when you have skill-boosting roles for them.

Lowering the ability and necessity to grind skills, especially right off the bat, is nothing but a good thing for an RPI, IMO.

The best RPI system, I think, would ultimately be to do away with skill points entirely, substituting them for more of a pro/con attribute point pool system ("Agile Defender", "Brute Strength", "Greatsword Mastery", "Bad Leg", "Chronic Illness", etc), while keeping craft branching (since folks love to branch crafts) attached to attributes. Grinding combat skills has always detracted from roleplay and immersion, and makes it rather jarring when you're attempting to play an older or more experienced character, whereas an attribute system would provide new characters with an immediate schematic for how to play their character, and support more versatile builds.

But, that's not really what this thread is about. I absolutely don't think that skill points should transfer over to your next character, as that will only increase the importance of always grinding to the top, and finding ways to take advantage of chargen as much as possible.

To me, the idea of allowing skill points to transfer over is sort of a stop-gag approach to fixing the issue of skill grinding being a negative time sink for an RPI, and (to return to my original point) removing skill points entirely is a far better solution to the problem.

I do not often play combant-oriented characters, mind you, but I honestly do not see the difference between grinding combat and grinding crafting. You're grinding either way. You're working, either way, towards competency in something. If I rolled up a character and could immediately be exactly where I want to be skill wise I will get super bored. I like something to work for. I like to earn that something.

No one is making anyone grind for skills, if you do grind for skills, that is your choice. Ultimately you could not grind and you could come up with any number of plausible IC reasons why your character sucks in one avenue or another.

I do agree that the starting skillpoint pool seems a little on the low side, but not massively so. Otherwise, I do not really like the idea of rolling over skill points.

RPP leading to overpowered characters has always been an issue on SoI, and one I didn't particularly like.

That said, I hate the occasional spam-crafting for sake of skill leveling. More for the pointlessness of it than anything else. I'd rather have a coded (craft?) way to train a skill, similar to training arenas, to prevent the economy-crushing loads of wooden daggers and leather straps.